In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence…

…Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

To clarify: Obama/Biden did not have a smug and/or condescending reaction to the Palin pick. Their reaction was respectful and their attacks substantive (they defended her from the blogger/National Enquirer attacks on her family). Fundamentally, the left does not reject her for hunting moose and being from a small town. The reject her because she is, as evidenced by her interview with Charlie Gibson, a shockingly unqualified candidate for executive office. Brooks knows this and admits as much today.

To his credit, he joins a distinguished list of conservatives (including David Frum, Ross Douhat, Rod Dreher, Krauthammer, etc.) who love their families and their country enough to refuse the utter insanity of the McCain/Palin ticket. These men are demonstrating that they possess a level of intellectual honesty that is worthy of deep respect.

Today David Brooks took a turn towards the dark side with his column about Barack Obama. The basic theme is that Obama is a sojourner (read: foreigner). Brooks writes that wherever Obama has been he merely inhabits the place, but does not become of it.

The implication? Obama is in America, but not really of it. He is not, in short, one of us.

This is a disgusting piece of xenophobia that uses a classic anti-semitic trope against a man who is an all-American success story. Brooks is usually a reasonably thoughtful conservative so I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, but he would be wise to examine the bias that drove him to pen this column. Shame on him.

I get two newspapers delivered to my door every morning: The New York Times and the New York Sun. Last night before I went to bed I thought, I bet the media’s take on the Berlin speech (200,000 people!) will be that it was impressive, but, perhaps, too much, too soon. Obama, they will point out, isn’t even his party’s official nominee.

In part, I was right. The New York Sun’s headline is McCain Camp Hopes for Backlash. The New York Times, on the other hand, takes a different tack. The speech, they say, was “vague on issues.” Inside, David Brooks attacks for the same reason. He’s bored by the “tired” rhetoric of change. He wants substance.

I’ll admit that the speech was filled with lofty and hollow political boilerplate. But Obama is not the party’s nominee. As he has said repeatedly, he is there as a senator. To go into specifics would have been unseemly and pretentious. The speech he gave was the right one; blandly inspiring, a call for comity between nations. And he can hardly help that 200,000 people showed up to hear it.

So what is going on here? It is this: the media feels it’s not fair to poor, pathetic John McCain. Look at him wandering around a supermarket desperate for media attention, posting videos about the media’s love affair with Obama. This hurts, and they begin to question themselves and look outward: Obama shouldn’t be making them shine a spotlight on him. Obama is to blame.

This is simply another iteration of journalists’ existential crisis of the moment: are we fair and balanced? Old pros like Andrea Mitchell go out of their way to skew the Obama coverage negatively because she thinks the whole things is overkill (or because like her husband Alan Greenspan, she’s a Republican?). The papers and talking heads come out with a backlash that is as predictable as the rising sun.

But here is the backlash to the backlash. Don’t pity poor McCain because Americans aren’t interested in him. He taunted Obama into taking the trip. It backfired. Obama’s team orchestrates well, but they don’t have a gun to any body’s head. Media, if you want to get upset, get upset at yourself.

As a general rule, journalists are under-confident people; that’s why they chose to write about others. Obama conducted himself ably and with presidential command on an overseas trip. That’s the story because that’s the truth. Anything else and you are being manipulated by McCain and your own lack of confidence in your work.

The editorial page of the New York Times is arguably the most influential in the world. Lately, I’ve begun to feel that the page has grown a little stale. In an attempt to understand why, I decided to rank the columnists who regularly appear there. This ranking system is presented beginning with the worst columnist (#11) and continues to the best (#1), and is measured on a purely subjective qualitative scale.

So, without further ado:

11. Irving Kristol’s son. This smug, lizard-faced, son-of-privilege delights in writing columns that he believes tweak the noses of the Times liberal readership. This is, as far as I can tell, his only goal. When he signed on, he was already way overexposed writing and editing for the Weekly Standard, appearing on Fox News, etc. It still remains a mystery why the NY Times felt this “useful idiot” needed another platform. A disastrous addition, expect him to be gone in one year.

10. Thomas Friedman. This self-important Iraq War supporter is responsible for foisting the worst metaphor in the history of metaphors upon an unsuspecting public with “The World is Flat.” A globalist lapdog, he is beloved by a middle-brow audience for his “Aftab Meets the Future” columns and equivocal analyses of complex situations. Rarely worth the read (now he’s going green, ugh), somehow he’s the star of the paper. He’ll be there for as long as he wants.

9. Roger Cohen. The Parisian Partisan. Combines a love of France with oddly unsexy writing. He is a longtime foreign correspondent who originally appeared as a columnist in the International Herald Tribune. His opinions reflect a bien-pensant benignity that would be right at home during cocktails at Bernard Kouchner’s. His columns are eminently skippable. Seems like a decent fellow, though.

8. Nicholas Kristof. In a word? Borrrrring. He bleeds for the world and wants you to bleed, too. Darfur, sex trafficking, the occasional toe dipped into the Middle East. Somehow he makes these topics seem even more wonkishly mind-numbing than they actually are. I appreciate the effort, I really do, but I don’t read him very often. If I’m ever feeling too pleased with life, I’ll give him a shot, but otherwise I’d sooner read the letters to the editor.

7. Charles Blow. Haven’t the faintest idea who this is. He’s listed on the website as publishing every other Saturday. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything he’s written.

6. David Brooks. Brooks is still capable of a broad social insight and a truly thought-provoking piece, but he might be overtaxed by the demands of the paper. He seems to want to come up with a fresh idea for every column and some of them are hurting (did you read that weird, dorky one about the magic of the Middle Ages?). That said, Brooks is a good writer and a smart guy and he should stay. Maybe just one column a week?

5. Paul Krugman. It pains me to put him here because he was, easily, the best columnist they had during the Bush years. His scalding attacks left you breathless with their intelligence, research, and evocative writing. But Krugman might be like Churchill; without a war, he’s just an irritating eccentric. Now that Bush is winding down, Krugman’s political columns have become flat and, often, misguided. Despite that, he’s got to stay, if only for his brilliant and clear writing on economics and related topics.

4. Bob Herbert. Even when he’s writing about something dull or obvious, which is fairly often, Herbert draws me in. His prose style makes convincing points without unnecessary flair and he’s capable of tugging on the heart strings. When Herbert writes about sex trafficking, you read it. He is a powerful, populist force on a sometimes sadly removed opinion page. He’s there to stay.

3. Maureen Dowd. The paper’s other big star, she’s clever as all hell and loves to show it. Plus, she’s kind of hot for an older broad. I don’t have much to complain about with Dowd, except that she’s a little bitter about men. She’s got a bead on Washington and a sense of fairness and common sense backed up by a wicked vocabulary and the tools to wield it like a knife.

2. Gail Collins. I’m surprised by this one myself. Collins used to run the page and now writes on Mondays and Thursdays. I’ve been reading her columns on the campaign and they are laugh-out-loud funny. I swear I’m on the subway snorting into my shirt. She happily deflates any political pretension and serves up a serious dose of real world perspective. She has quickly supplanted Dowd as the best (Irish-American?) woman on the page.

And, the winner is:

1. Frank Rich. Rich is always on-point, always ahead of the game, always capable of a new, interesting idea or a startling insight. His prose is accessible, but nuanced. He brings gravity and seriousness to his columns while sacrificing nothing in terms of, yes, pleasure in reading. Rich writes once a week on Sundays and this is a good perch for him. His column is the first one I check in the Week in Review.

So there you have it. My suggestion is that Andrew Rosenthal gets rid of the last five (or keep Blow, but give him real shot) and adds some fresh blood to the page. Here, as an added bonus, are my suggestions for the additions: